Essays and commentaries from Malaysia's foremost thinker and philosopher

Sunday, August 28, 2016

THE TRUE MEANING OF INDEPENDENCE

THE TRUE CELEBRATION
OF INDEPENDENCE

By: Kassim Ahmad

28 August, 2016

This is the 60th year of
our independence. We spend millions of ringgit yearly to celebrate this auspicious
day of 31 August with parades and the like, with every citizen flying or waving
the national flag. We have been doing this year in and year out.

Is this the true spirit that we want to inculcate in our
citizens? Of course the parades and such like have their uses. But independence
must mean more than that. It must mean the acting out of freedom in our souls.
We must act freely to realize our place in the several countries that we are in
and in the world -- the just and peaceful world that everyone wants.

In this sense of the word independence, we are far from it in the several countries
that we are citizens of and in the wider world.
We suffer hardships of various kinds and magnitudes. The ultimate
hardship would be a Third World War, using nuclear weapons. So far we are in
stalemate, one bloc fearing destruction at the hands of the opposite bloc – the
so-called mutual assured destruction, the MAD of human madness!

That means our independence is
hollow and a fake. That means we are not at peace with ourselves, the OTHER
being no more than ourselves. This is a scary and disastrous discovery. Where
have we gone wrong?

To answer that question, let me bring
two pointers from the Quran. In Surah Al-Baqarah,
verse 30, God informs the angles that He wishes to create a human being to rule
and change the earth, to which the angles protest, arguing that the human beings
would spread evil and shed blood. God simply replies He knows better.

Humans have of course shed blood in
the two World Wars.

But he is also a creator
civilizations, the good side of him that God refers to.

The second pointer is from the first
Surah, the great human prayer to his Lord. Verses 6-7, states, “Guide us in the
right path, the path of those whom You blessed, not of those who have deserved
wrath, nor of the strayers.”

Let us analyse these two verses.
Those whom God bessed are clear. They are the true believers. Those who incur His
wrath are also clear, that is the deniers of God and their ownselves. The
strayers are those who think that they are believers, but are in actual fact
disbelievers.

So those who
are actually free are those who live in this blessed state of freedom, happy with
themselves, happy with their environment and happy with their Lord. They are in
the abode of Paradise.

About Me

(About Kassim Ahmad
By: M. Bakri Musa)
Kassim Ahmad is Malaysia's foremost thinker and philosopher. He grabbed national headlines in the 1950s with his dissertation on the characters of Hang Tuah (Perwatakan Hang Tuah), the Malay literary classic. In it he challenged the traditional interpretation and made the hitherto hero Hang Tuah as nothing more than a palace hack, and elevated the anti-hero Hang Jebat as the true hero, willing to kill even the sultan in defence of honor and principles.
Kassim was jailed for nearly five years under the ISA for daring to express openly his political views, an experience which he recounted in his book, Universiti Kedua (Second University).
Kassim again shook the Malay world with his "Hadith: A Re-Examination" in which he challenges the infallibility of the purported words of Prophet Muhammad s.a.w.
Except for an honorary doctorate in Letters conferred by the National University of Malaysia, the country has not seen fit to honor this great public intellectual.
June 2005